


The Swift, Uplifting Rush

by TheLizard



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Epilogue, Gen, Happy ending (?), It may be a little misleading to tag these characters, It's Okay, RDR2, but they're there, inspired by the theorizing I've seen about the blue jay and the eagle in the epilogue, post-epilogue, rdr2 spoilers, they're mentioned but have no dialogue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-20
Updated: 2019-09-20
Packaged: 2020-10-24 23:24:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20714279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLizard/pseuds/TheLizard
Summary: In 1907, despite everything, the world still turns.A certain little blue jay watches.





	The Swift, Uplifting Rush

There is a ranch now. Though _now_ is hard to define and certainly harder are _before_ and _after_. There is _only now,_ now. _Where_ is difficult as well, but it is _home;_ that he knows, easily. Not for him, but... for them.

It's not his home, but he stays for a while. Longer, perhaps, than he has stayed anywhere else. He is (is with?) something small, now. Tiny claws, tiny beak, tiny pounding heart and feathers of blue, blue, blue. He feels, and is, and is only borrowing, all at once. He has been larger, and smaller -- he has been thundering hooves and wind through fur and tender whiskers and quick, dark scales. He has been much, since that time when he was only one. _That_ was _before_, he thinks.

But in the endless _now,_ he is vast, and in the immediate now, he is here. With the feathers. The home comes together around him -- through rain and sun, cold and heat, and pain sometimes; it comes together in wood and sweat and laughter. It is almost complete, but not quite, when the final wedge of clay is shoved into place. It _is_ complete, at last, when the family is together. Home.

This feels like a wish fulfilled.

They are not always together -- not all of them. Once, he finds the house two short, then finds the two far away, and a third, and they are wind-whipped and bloody in the howling, freezing white. They are leaving. There is a shack (empty now) and a body (empty now). There is a figure, trudging down the mountain.

He knows the face, though it's changed. Knows the set of the shoulders against the cold. But the man, he doesn't know.

He does not linger there.

He sees the buck, sometimes. The great, graceful stag, bathed in golden light and treading through the soft and noiseless grass. It interests him, but so does everything else, flowing around him, surrounding him like lapping water. He follows the ripples out, and back, out, and back. He follows them to the ranch. He follows them to a butcher shop. He follows them to a quiet study, contentment, freckles, wet ink; to a baby, soft, dark skin and dark eyes, a smile; to a hill with a view of the setting sun. She is there. He brushes against her, he thinks, a quick, gentle _thereness,_ like water lapping the rocks, before the tide recedes and he recedes, back, back, softly back.

_Now_ is hard to define; _time_ is meaningless and inexhaustible but he spends all of it watching, and what he watches spends all of it changing. He sees it, in the baby, the ranch, the shifting banks of rivers and streams. He sees it in the forests -- in the soft green of new life, and the bowing, splintering, breaking of old majesty. He sees it, distinctly, in one tree. It is tall, when he finds it, though not as tall as some of its fellows. It is sturdy, but not yet wizened. That will come, he knows.

But it doesn't. Time flows and he watches and the tree softens, sags, colors and discolors and trembles in the wind, then crumbles, and joins its reddened leaves on the eternal forest floor. The others look on. This is familiar. This reminds him of a thing that does not matter -- hasn't mattered, since _now_ began.

He whistles away on the wind. Finds a different tree. A boy. A book. This, he watches, and it feels like cool, clear water under a perfect sun.

This time, when he sees the stag, he knows. (Decides?) The wash of the _everything_ is familiar now, he has lapped out and back over all of it, but there is one ripple he has never followed.

He takes to wing, maybe, or he is the wing, or he is the wind -- and he follows it

home.

**Author's Note:**

> After reading some speculation on forums about the jay that watches the ranch come together, and the eagle on Arthur's grave, I had to explore that idea a little...
> 
> Title taken from 'Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep' by Mary Elizabeth Frye.


End file.
